Newsnight tells us the Royal Mail is set to be privatised. Look at our bus services, our rail, our medicine, our education - making a mint for a few is bound to make services better for everyone.
I've never voted for Labour. Not when it was run by a narcissistic psychopath, nor afterwards by a Stalinist depressive. I can't vote for a party led by a gobbling Marxist-lecturer's-son hereditary-leader sixth-form-debater Tweedledum or his simmeringly resentful Dee brother.
But how can a supposedly fragile Coalition be so bold? It must be the recklessness of despair. Après leurs, le déluge.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
My Long Walk To Freedom
Almost five years have passed since I cracked open an eyelid and looked at the world anew.
I live in Scotland, in a wee village where not much has changed for decades. Crime is almost non-existent, my two sons received a goodish education, my wife works full-time, and I continue to use the village to launch my visits to Africa and beyond. Life was good, all were happy and all were feeling relatively secure.
In late 2005 I learnt about the impending smoking ban which was slated to kick off on March 26th 2006. I was incensed. I was outraged. I knew the damage it would bring to the hospitality industry, so I read, and I read, and I read. I studied the proposed law and I was stunned at how easy it was to get an abomination like this through Holyrood. The law was flawed. In fact, according to a QC I know in Edinburgh, it contained five major flaws and two minor flaws. He was, he said, quite happy to launch a Judicial Review to overturn the law but he also said he needed 250 thousand pounds to achieve it. Game over. It was, in fact, game over for nearly 12,000 pubs and clubs. They still shut down at a phenomenal rate.
In 2008 I discovered the Freeman Movement and I was enthralled. The principles were sound, the theory was sound, so I threw myself at reading statute after statute. My head was bursting with a million facts and I was now on the warpath. I was an enemy of the state. This was okay, because the state was always my enemy. They hate me. They hate you too. If you doubt that, take a brief look at the many thousands of things they do not do in our name.
Later on I started reading Magna Carta (1215 as well as 1297) and I knew the answers lay within. MC1215 is unique. It is a Treaty between the King and his people. It was for all time, and it could not be amended, repealed, rewritten, or undone in any way. This Treaty was not created by parliament-it was written and enacted 50 years before the first English parliament was even born. De Montfort and his early parliamentarians only got started in 1265-and as MC1215 was not created by them, they, and successive governments, had/have no right to fiddle with it. As far as I am concerned, the document is lawfully extant. Every word of it.
In June 2008 I entered Lawful Rebellion. I invoked Article 61, as is my right as an Englishman, although the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish also have the same right: Barons from all four corners of what is now the UK came together to add their autographs to this world-changing Treaty. This Treaty serves us all. In 2001 a Barons Committee was formed following the horrendous House of Lords Act 1999. Some 70 Peers entered Lawful Rebellion and advised Mrs Windsor accordingly. I did the same thing using a series of Affidavits between June and September of 2008. In essence, I am no longer beholden to any statute bearing Mrs Windsors name, nor am I obliged to obey any of her agents, or indeed, anyone who has sworn an Oath of Allegiance to her. My allegiance is to the Barons Committee. I am not alone in this. Some 800,000 people in Britain have sent the same documents, and made the same oath: to distrain and distress Mrs Windsor and her agents until redress is obtained.
I have been distraining and distressing like billy-oh ever since.
It is not a comfortable life, seeking confrontation with the state at every turn, but I enjoy it. I have learnt to say "No", forcefully, politely, and often. It may surprise you to learn just how powerful this word is.
One of my tasks (part of the distraining and distressing thing) is to withhold taxes as often as I can. So when I got a demand from HMRC for 5K 'owed' to them in Corporation Tax I thought I would try my new found skill. They sent me letter after letter, demand after demand and threat after threat. It went on for a while and in order to stay in honour (very important in law) I continuously made them a "Conditional Agreement To Pay". This staved off court action because I never said I would not pay, just that I needed them to answer a few simple questions before I did so.
I ended up writing to their Solicitors Office when they were handed the problem. It took me three letters to remove their interest in me completely. What voodoo did I use? Which particular words threw them into a tailspin?
Just these:
"Please prove that I, Captain James Ranty*, a living, breathing man, owe you a single penny".
*my nom de guerre
The letters stopped. The demands stopped. The threats stopped. Everything stopped. I have not heard a word since 2009.
As daft as it sounds, the words 'human being' do not appear in any tax statutes. Not once. The word 'person' appears hundreds of times, I grant you, but I am not a person. Their definition of person is: "corporation sole, limited company, or legal fiction".
I am none of those and I am therefore not obliged to pay tax. That, plus my obligations as a Lawful Rebel, put me way beyond their reach. To date, I have withheld over 15K in taxes and fines.
The courts are very different. I have not had a good outcome there. I am not a habitual criminal, by the way, but I did decide to treat a speeding 'offence' a little differently than most. I refused to complete the Notice of Intended Prosecution form. It allowed me only to plead guilty and that is not right. Not according to the Bill of Rights 1689 or the Scottish version, Claim of Right 1689. There is a maxim that states "A man cannot be hanged by his own evidence" (I have paraphrased) and I told the courts this. They did the only thing they could do: they ignored me, and kept sending policemen to my home. They got short shrift as well, but I eventually ended up in magistrates court and I was 'awarded' 9 points. 3 for speeding, and 6 for not hanging myself.
Along the way I learnt many things, including:
1. Mrs Windsor abdicated in 1972 when she gave Assent to the European Communities Act.
2. Because of that, every police officer acts unlawfully, as does every court in the land.
3. Parliament is both an illegal and an unlawful gathering.
4. We have been bankrupt since the Napoleonic Wars.
5. America remains a British colony, and still pays taxes to Mrs Windsor.
6. Washington DC is NOT part of the USA.
7. The City of London is NOT part of the UK.
8. ALL law comes from the Vatican, this includes Islamic and Judean Law.
9. The Vatican owns every living being on the planet-See Unam Sanctam of 1302.
10. We are all dead-See the Cestui Que Vie Act of 1666.
11. Our money is worthless. It is fiat currency, and operates only on faith.
12. Banknotes are promissory notes. According to the Bill of Exchange Act of 1882 I can also create promissory notes. So can you.
I could go on, but I have discovered that the only way to know a thing, is to research it for yourself. Some of this stuff seems utterly unbelievable at first glance, but that is mostly because we have been misled by corrupt governments for hundreds of years. Most of them have no idea how deep the rabbit hole is, and I think that very, very few of the proles (myself included) have no real idea either.
Like it or not, we are cash cows. We will be milked until we squeal. Looking around me, at Generation Meh, it will be quite some time before the Establishment hears any significant noise from us. They have a Black Belt, Fifth Dan, in the Art of Distraction.
To wrap up, consider this:
In what world would the master/servant relationship be reversed and condoned? In ours, of course.
We pay these public servants to run the country. No more, and no less. They lie, cheat and steal from us on a daily basis. They take our money and waste it in new and disturbing ways. We pay THEM yet we stand looking sheepish as they punish US. We pay our policemen and women to kick the crap out of us. We pay them so well, and protect them so well that they have killed almost 1,800 of us in the last nine years and guess how many were prosecuted for wrongful death? None. Not one. Those 1,800 who died after coming into contact with the police? Just coincidence. Nothing more.
Our taxes pay for bombs and bullets which are rained down on innocent brown men, women and children in foreign climes. We are supporting massacres with our tax dollars, in direct contravention of the laws which came after the Nuremberg Trials, and in direct contravention of the Terrorism Act of 2006. Their own statutes tell us that anyone sponsoring illegal wars and insurrections is as guilty as those prosecuting them. And yet we pay.
We pay because we feel we cannot refuse. If we do, they promise to send burly men to come and haul us off to the courts. They don't. I am living proof of that.
One definition of slavery is doing work for no recompense coupled with the threat of force if you do not comply. Every single employer is enslaved. Every single employer collects your tax from source for absolutely no reward. Slavery never ended. They just introduced a new subtlety.
It isn't all about money. It is essentially about freedom. Freedom from thuggish police, from inept, greedy, self-serving politicians, freedom to shop in a large town or city without being captured on video more than 300 times in a three hour visit, freedom to travel the highways and byways without let, hindrance or charge. This right was granted to all in the Bor/CoR 1688/9. The freedom to live, rather than merely exist. The freedom to ignore a snooping, tracking, eavesdropping, nannying government.
In short, I want to be left alone. The very moment they leave me in peace, I will stop being a thorn in their side.
Captain Ranty.
PS-If I were you, I would disbelieve every word in this piece. I would click my way around the interwebs in an effort to locate some the facts mentioned here. I would question everything, and I would default to my number one priority, which is to follow the money. Do that, and you should find yourself wondering how the hell you were deceived for so long. Good luck and Godspeed.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
I live in Scotland, in a wee village where not much has changed for decades. Crime is almost non-existent, my two sons received a goodish education, my wife works full-time, and I continue to use the village to launch my visits to Africa and beyond. Life was good, all were happy and all were feeling relatively secure.
In late 2005 I learnt about the impending smoking ban which was slated to kick off on March 26th 2006. I was incensed. I was outraged. I knew the damage it would bring to the hospitality industry, so I read, and I read, and I read. I studied the proposed law and I was stunned at how easy it was to get an abomination like this through Holyrood. The law was flawed. In fact, according to a QC I know in Edinburgh, it contained five major flaws and two minor flaws. He was, he said, quite happy to launch a Judicial Review to overturn the law but he also said he needed 250 thousand pounds to achieve it. Game over. It was, in fact, game over for nearly 12,000 pubs and clubs. They still shut down at a phenomenal rate.
In 2008 I discovered the Freeman Movement and I was enthralled. The principles were sound, the theory was sound, so I threw myself at reading statute after statute. My head was bursting with a million facts and I was now on the warpath. I was an enemy of the state. This was okay, because the state was always my enemy. They hate me. They hate you too. If you doubt that, take a brief look at the many thousands of things they do not do in our name.
Later on I started reading Magna Carta (1215 as well as 1297) and I knew the answers lay within. MC1215 is unique. It is a Treaty between the King and his people. It was for all time, and it could not be amended, repealed, rewritten, or undone in any way. This Treaty was not created by parliament-it was written and enacted 50 years before the first English parliament was even born. De Montfort and his early parliamentarians only got started in 1265-and as MC1215 was not created by them, they, and successive governments, had/have no right to fiddle with it. As far as I am concerned, the document is lawfully extant. Every word of it.
In June 2008 I entered Lawful Rebellion. I invoked Article 61, as is my right as an Englishman, although the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish also have the same right: Barons from all four corners of what is now the UK came together to add their autographs to this world-changing Treaty. This Treaty serves us all. In 2001 a Barons Committee was formed following the horrendous House of Lords Act 1999. Some 70 Peers entered Lawful Rebellion and advised Mrs Windsor accordingly. I did the same thing using a series of Affidavits between June and September of 2008. In essence, I am no longer beholden to any statute bearing Mrs Windsors name, nor am I obliged to obey any of her agents, or indeed, anyone who has sworn an Oath of Allegiance to her. My allegiance is to the Barons Committee. I am not alone in this. Some 800,000 people in Britain have sent the same documents, and made the same oath: to distrain and distress Mrs Windsor and her agents until redress is obtained.
I have been distraining and distressing like billy-oh ever since.
It is not a comfortable life, seeking confrontation with the state at every turn, but I enjoy it. I have learnt to say "No", forcefully, politely, and often. It may surprise you to learn just how powerful this word is.
One of my tasks (part of the distraining and distressing thing) is to withhold taxes as often as I can. So when I got a demand from HMRC for 5K 'owed' to them in Corporation Tax I thought I would try my new found skill. They sent me letter after letter, demand after demand and threat after threat. It went on for a while and in order to stay in honour (very important in law) I continuously made them a "Conditional Agreement To Pay". This staved off court action because I never said I would not pay, just that I needed them to answer a few simple questions before I did so.
I ended up writing to their Solicitors Office when they were handed the problem. It took me three letters to remove their interest in me completely. What voodoo did I use? Which particular words threw them into a tailspin?
Just these:
"Please prove that I, Captain James Ranty*, a living, breathing man, owe you a single penny".
*my nom de guerre
The letters stopped. The demands stopped. The threats stopped. Everything stopped. I have not heard a word since 2009.
As daft as it sounds, the words 'human being' do not appear in any tax statutes. Not once. The word 'person' appears hundreds of times, I grant you, but I am not a person. Their definition of person is: "corporation sole, limited company, or legal fiction".
I am none of those and I am therefore not obliged to pay tax. That, plus my obligations as a Lawful Rebel, put me way beyond their reach. To date, I have withheld over 15K in taxes and fines.
The courts are very different. I have not had a good outcome there. I am not a habitual criminal, by the way, but I did decide to treat a speeding 'offence' a little differently than most. I refused to complete the Notice of Intended Prosecution form. It allowed me only to plead guilty and that is not right. Not according to the Bill of Rights 1689 or the Scottish version, Claim of Right 1689. There is a maxim that states "A man cannot be hanged by his own evidence" (I have paraphrased) and I told the courts this. They did the only thing they could do: they ignored me, and kept sending policemen to my home. They got short shrift as well, but I eventually ended up in magistrates court and I was 'awarded' 9 points. 3 for speeding, and 6 for not hanging myself.
Along the way I learnt many things, including:
1. Mrs Windsor abdicated in 1972 when she gave Assent to the European Communities Act.
2. Because of that, every police officer acts unlawfully, as does every court in the land.
3. Parliament is both an illegal and an unlawful gathering.
4. We have been bankrupt since the Napoleonic Wars.
5. America remains a British colony, and still pays taxes to Mrs Windsor.
6. Washington DC is NOT part of the USA.
7. The City of London is NOT part of the UK.
8. ALL law comes from the Vatican, this includes Islamic and Judean Law.
9. The Vatican owns every living being on the planet-See Unam Sanctam of 1302.
10. We are all dead-See the Cestui Que Vie Act of 1666.
11. Our money is worthless. It is fiat currency, and operates only on faith.
12. Banknotes are promissory notes. According to the Bill of Exchange Act of 1882 I can also create promissory notes. So can you.
I could go on, but I have discovered that the only way to know a thing, is to research it for yourself. Some of this stuff seems utterly unbelievable at first glance, but that is mostly because we have been misled by corrupt governments for hundreds of years. Most of them have no idea how deep the rabbit hole is, and I think that very, very few of the proles (myself included) have no real idea either.
Like it or not, we are cash cows. We will be milked until we squeal. Looking around me, at Generation Meh, it will be quite some time before the Establishment hears any significant noise from us. They have a Black Belt, Fifth Dan, in the Art of Distraction.
To wrap up, consider this:
In what world would the master/servant relationship be reversed and condoned? In ours, of course.
We pay these public servants to run the country. No more, and no less. They lie, cheat and steal from us on a daily basis. They take our money and waste it in new and disturbing ways. We pay THEM yet we stand looking sheepish as they punish US. We pay our policemen and women to kick the crap out of us. We pay them so well, and protect them so well that they have killed almost 1,800 of us in the last nine years and guess how many were prosecuted for wrongful death? None. Not one. Those 1,800 who died after coming into contact with the police? Just coincidence. Nothing more.
Our taxes pay for bombs and bullets which are rained down on innocent brown men, women and children in foreign climes. We are supporting massacres with our tax dollars, in direct contravention of the laws which came after the Nuremberg Trials, and in direct contravention of the Terrorism Act of 2006. Their own statutes tell us that anyone sponsoring illegal wars and insurrections is as guilty as those prosecuting them. And yet we pay.
We pay because we feel we cannot refuse. If we do, they promise to send burly men to come and haul us off to the courts. They don't. I am living proof of that.
One definition of slavery is doing work for no recompense coupled with the threat of force if you do not comply. Every single employer is enslaved. Every single employer collects your tax from source for absolutely no reward. Slavery never ended. They just introduced a new subtlety.
It isn't all about money. It is essentially about freedom. Freedom from thuggish police, from inept, greedy, self-serving politicians, freedom to shop in a large town or city without being captured on video more than 300 times in a three hour visit, freedom to travel the highways and byways without let, hindrance or charge. This right was granted to all in the Bor/CoR 1688/9. The freedom to live, rather than merely exist. The freedom to ignore a snooping, tracking, eavesdropping, nannying government.
In short, I want to be left alone. The very moment they leave me in peace, I will stop being a thorn in their side.
Captain Ranty.
PS-If I were you, I would disbelieve every word in this piece. I would click my way around the interwebs in an effort to locate some the facts mentioned here. I would question everything, and I would default to my number one priority, which is to follow the money. Do that, and you should find yourself wondering how the hell you were deceived for so long. Good luck and Godspeed.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
Big US banks are making people homeless through secondary loansharking
Read this outrageous story from Michael Snyder. JPM and others are buying up local government tax debts, multiplying them with their own charges and forcing homeowners onto the street.
Some people are losing the roof over their heads for a debt that costs no more than a good meal in a restaurant: "big banks and hedge funds keep tacking on interest, penalties and legal fees until the tax bills are many times the size that they originally were."
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/how-big-banks-can-steal-your-home-from-you-even-if-your-mortgage-is-totally-paid-off
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing.
Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
Some people are losing the roof over their heads for a debt that costs no more than a good meal in a restaurant: "big banks and hedge funds keep tacking on interest, penalties and legal fees until the tax bills are many times the size that they originally were."
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/how-big-banks-can-steal-your-home-from-you-even-if-your-mortgage-is-totally-paid-off
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing.
Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Time to ease the Green Belt a couple of notches?
Professor Paul Cheshire thinks so; I beg to differ, but not because I'm a rich Nimby. Doubtless the Professor knows vastly more than I do, but the debate is taking place on a new site called The Conversation and as they say, "two views make a market".
Here's a link to what he says, and here is what I say in the comments below his article:
Sorry to quote myself, but it's quicker if I give a couple of links to posts I've offered on this:
1. Per square kilometre of arable land, the UK has some 1,077 people to feed - more than twice what is sustainable without food imports. Just as we are now beginning to worry about energy security, we also need to make food security a higher priority.
http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/britains-food-security-future-challenge
2. You could say that we do not have a housing shortage, but heightened expectations of personal living space:
http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/what-housing-shortage.html
Best wishes...
I look forward to the riposte.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing.
Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
Here's a link to what he says, and here is what I say in the comments below his article:
Sorry to quote myself, but it's quicker if I give a couple of links to posts I've offered on this:
1. Per square kilometre of arable land, the UK has some 1,077 people to feed - more than twice what is sustainable without food imports. Just as we are now beginning to worry about energy security, we also need to make food security a higher priority.
http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/britains-food-security-future-challenge
2. You could say that we do not have a housing shortage, but heightened expectations of personal living space:
http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/what-housing-shortage.html
Best wishes...
I look forward to the riposte.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing.
Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
Syria: a situation reading by David Malone
In the last of his 3-part series on Syria: Cui Bono? David Malone looks at the geopolitics and ends with a dark theory or two: the French are teaming up with Qatar in order to be freer from Russian use of energy as a political weapon, and powers outside Syria would be content to have a permanent multifactional revolutionary ferment there so that nobody ever gets the control, while the territory continues to be used as a conduit for oil and natural gas.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing.
Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing.
Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
Energy efficiency: method vs. objective
 |
| Alzetta's petrol-driven mechanical horse (Pic: http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=2595) |
Is our thinking radical enough? Imagine if all we had done in the twentieth century was to replace living horses with mechanical ones to pull carts and waggons.
Similarly, making internal combustion engines more efficient and cleaner is good, but this still focuses on cars as a method rather than re-examines what they're for. ATOC reckons rail is better:
"... on average, passenger rail currently emits approximately half the carbon dioxide per passenger kilometre of cars and around a quarter that of domestic air... This analysis is based on average figures. Quite clearly, in any specific example, the occupancy of the vehicle is key. A fully-loaded car will perform well on a CO2 per passenger km basis compared to the most efficient train with very few people in it. Similarly the averages quoted here cover a range of traffic conditions and may well differ from those of individual operators running specific services. Nonetheless these average figures clarify the starting position. Further work is needed to consider the effect of practical policy options open to us to reduce emissions from transport."
Shame about Beeching, then; and about the way that rail travel has become so expensive on certain routes. Privatisation may have helped certain entrepreneurs and (indirectly) some politicians, but there was nothing much wrong with the old transport system in Birmingham in 1975, and the lower level of car ownership then. Now, some of my young colleagues prefer to run a car instead of building a pension and saving up to buy a house - this DM article says that lower earners can be paying 27% of their disposable income in this way.
On the other hand, there is a welcome new realism about "green transport" in the air. This week there will be an EU vote in Strasbourg on revising targets for the contribution of biofuels to energy production, as London MEP Mary Honeyball explains. This is, it seems in response to growing awareness of the impact of corn ethanol production on food prices; plus the relative expensiveness of alternative fuels. The EC Commissioner for Energy Günther Oettinger also admits that electric vehicles will contribute less to the solution than previously expected (see this video at 1:20 in).
Rather than design better mechanical horses, it would help more if we and our stuff were in the right places to start with. To quote Douglas Adams, one of the finest philosophers of the twentieth century:
"Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be."
Many of our current solutions are a sort of Marie Antoinette washed-sheep playing with a fantasy version of reality; alternative technologies can be cute and clean without really being green.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing.
Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
Davy Jones' garbage
Look beneath your lid some morning,
See those things you didn't quite consume
The world's a can for
Your fresh garbage . . .
I loved
that song when I first heard it in 1968, on the compilation LP “The Rock
Machine Turns You On”[3] – Jay
Ferguson’s distant, lost-sounding, disillusioned tenor voice, perfect for the teenager
in turmoil.
It’s still
relevant, and the biggest rubbish bin of all is the sea. A lot of this is
plastic, not only on shores, where it represents 60% – 80% of all litter
(Derraik, 2002[4])
but in vast swirling oceanic garbage patches[5] -
and on the sea bed: in 1995 92% of debris on the floor of the Bay of Biscay was
plastic[6]. A
more recent article by Greenpeace says 70% of plastic litter sinks, and there
is an estimated 600,000 tons of it at the bottom of the North Sea.[7]
The debris
is unsightly, and can strangle or fill the stomachs of marine wildlife. It’s also
toxic, so developing biodegradable versions doesn’t solve the problem – indeed,
it could make it worse, since dissolved plastic is much harder to find and nearly
impossible to remove.
James
Higham posts a picture[8] of
a cleanup device still under development. It’s a giant static filter that the
inventor, Boyan Slat, hopes will trap surface garbage but allow plankton to pass
safely through; work continues.[9]
But even if it works perfectly, that still leaves the other, sunken 70% to deal
with. Yet again, techno-fixes have limitations.
I can remember
when we had shopping baskets and produce wasn’t shrink-wrapped. Will those days
ever come again?
[1] http://www.metrolyrics.com/fresh-garbage-lyrics-spirit.html
[2] http://youtu.be/k7MQ5rxUZsc
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rock_Machine_Turns_You_On
[4] http://www.caseinlet.org/uploads/Moore--Derraik_1_.pdf
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Marine_garbage_patches.
There are in fact more than three of them, as the articles go on to explain.
[6]
Derraik, Table 1 (see note 4).
[7] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/
[8] http://nourishingobscurity.com/2013/09/09/plastic-gobbler-of-the-seven-seas/comment-page-1/#comment-221633
[9] http://www.boyanslat.com/plastic5/
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